Crail, Shoregate and Harbour. View from south east.

Description Crail, Shoregate and Harbour. View from south east.

Date c. 1890

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 739214

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of F 1988

Scope and Content Inner Harbour and Quayside, Crail, Fife Crail, a small fishing town with a tidal harbour, sits on the eastern tip of the Fife peninsula overlooking the North Sea. This picturesque port, with 17th- and 18th-century houses huddled around the quayside, was photographed c.1890 by the Scottish photographer, Erskine Beveridge, providing some of the oldest known photographic records of the town. The harbour has an inner wall built with squared stones in vertical courses, suggesting a late medieval construction. Vertical wooden ladders give access from the quayside to the moored fishing boats, most of which are of the local Fife design with tall masts and a straight bow and stern although one (foreground) is an example of one of the earliest steam fishing boats in the district. The late 17th-century harled building with the notice board on the gable wall (left) is the harbour office. Crail's small harbour brought the town prosperity through Dutch and other European trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in the 18th century, the town was a major port for visiting Scottish herring boats from Angus and Aberdeenshire. However, in the 1790s the herring changed its pattern of migration in the North Sea, and the town's fishing industry was slow to recover, even after the herring returned to the Firth of Forth in the 1830s. Lobster and partan (edible crab) fishing continued to be the mainstay of most fishermen. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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